What is mobile marketing automation and what are its benefits?

September 12, 2019

According to a survey conducted by Blue
Corona, consumers spend more than 5 hours a day on their smartphone. In 2018,
mobile ad spends worldwide amounted to $138.1 billion and is expected to reach
$212.4 billion by 2021 (Statista). Thus, it is quite obvious that mobile
marketing is the best way to elevate your marketing efforts, which in turn
demands for mobile marketing automation.

What is mobile marketing automation?
Marketing automation refers to software or platforms used to automate manual
and repetitive processes in an organization, in order to boost all marketing
processes and effectively market on multiple channels. Marketing automation
activities are usually directed towards computers. Mobile marketing automation
is simply marketing automation for mobile devices. Mobile marketing automation
tools combine three important facets – personalized messaging, A/B testing and
analytics. With these, mobile marketing automation is used to send highly
targeted messages on users’ mobile devices, check what is and isn’t working and
make the required changes in real-time.

Mobile marketing automation tools come with
features unavailable in general marketing automation. With mobile marketing
automation, you can interact with your customers on their mobile devices, with
the help of push notifications, personalized SMS and MMS, in-app messaging and
more. Sending highly targeted, relevant and personalized messages to their
mobile devices can help you engage with your prospects at the right time. With
features like geolocation, you can gather valuable data about your customers
like their location, browsing habits etc. Unlike marketing automation, mobile
marketing automation tools allow segmentation and personalization specifically
designed for 1:1 communication.

The benefits of mobile marketing automation
include:

1. Increase in revenue – Every organization, irrespective of size and industry, has one
advantage, that is, achieving higher revenue and profit figures. Mobile
marketing automation tools can help you streamline and target your marketing
activities to be mobile-friendly. Consequently, there is a positive impact on
your ROI and revenue figures. Mobile marketing automation can collect valuable
customer data which can be used to design creative and customized mobile
marketing campaigns. This assists in lead nurturing activities. Additionally,
you can communicate with your customers in real-time, allowing you to
understand and respond to their requirements quickly.

2. Customer Retention – According to studies, it is 5 times more expensive to acquire a
new customer than to retain an existing one. Thus, apart from acquiring new
customers, it is important for companies to retain their existing ones. In
order to retain your customers, you must first understand their pain points,
requirements and needs. Additionally, you must also track and check which
marketing campaigns are working for which group of customers. This is where
mobile marketing automation comes in. An important facet of mobile marketing
automation is analytics. With mobile marketing automation tools, you can obtain
relevant insights into your customers’ behaviour, feedback about your
offerings, their touchpoints etc. As a result, you can predict your prospects’
future requirements and design campaigns to satisfy the same.

3. Segmentation & Personalization – Sending personalized content based on homogeneous segments is one
of the most important and useful features of marketing automation. With mobile
marketing automation, you can take this to another level. Mobile marketing
automation tools have geolocation capabilities which helps in collecting
valuable customer insights, like their location, browsing history, purchase
behaviour, the device they use and much more. Based on such information, you
can create targeted segments and design personalized marketing campaigns for
these target groups.

4. Automate engagement campaigns – The level of engagement of different users is different. While
some might make a purchase immediately after downloading your mobile app,
others might take months before they purchase something. Instead of trying to
manually engage with your leads, the best option is to automate engagement
campaigns with the help of mobile marketing automation. To do this, you must
first create segments based on user interests and actions. Once the segments
have been created, use mobile marketing automation tools to develop drip
nurturing campaigns to motivate prospects to take desired actions, like
complete account setup, make a purchase etc.

5. Re-engage old customers – An extension of the previous point, mobile marketing automation
can also be used to re-engage with inactive users. As mentioned previously, it
is much cheaper to retain old customers than to acquire new ones. Thus, when
existing users go inactive, it is essential to understand why they went
inactive and nurture them back into becoming paying customers. Mobile marketing
automation tools can create a segment of users who have gone inactive and then
send them reminder messages with offers and discounts to motivate them to
engage with you.

In today’s mobile-friendly world, mobile
marketing automation has an elevated value for marketers. Mobile marketing
automation tools are the best way to market on mobile devices, thereby
generating higher results and profits.